Laurent had given Lucas directions to his house and Lucas arrived a couple of minutes after seven o’clock, as a pizza truck was pulling away from the curb. Laurent lived in a fifties ranch house, with an add-on three-car garage at one end. Two guys in casual dress were standing outside Laurent’s side door, drinking beer from bottles, and when Lucas got out of the Benz, one of them said, “Must be the guy,” and the other called, “Wish I was a Minnesota cop, get a Benz like that.”

“I was too tall for the sports cars,” Lucas said. He came up and one of the men, a short bald guy, stuck out his hand and said, “Jim Bennett,” and the other said, “Doug Sellers.” They shook hands and Sellers said, “Rome is down the basement, probably suckin’ down those pizzas already.”

Sellers ran a hardware store, he said, and Bennett ran the post office.

Lucas followed them through the door and down to the basement, which had been converted into a recreation room. Along one wall were a number of photos, Laurent on deployment with the army, most of the photos showing him with camo’d-up guys with M-4s.

Laurent, as Bennett and Sellers had suggested, was loading up a plate with pizza from three boxes sitting on a Ping-Pong table. Three other men were sitting on a couple of couches and a La-Z-Boy facing a TV, and were eating or drinking beer.

Laurent saw Lucas and the others come down the stairs, and said, “Beer and Pepsi in the fridge, pepperoni and mushroom pizza. Come on over and meet the guys.”

Lucas shook hands with Barney Peters, a lawyer; Rick Barnes, who ran a Subway store; and Jerry Frisell, a high school teacher and coach. The guys turned out to be friends of Laurent. All of them were military veterans, all of them had been deployed in Iraq and were familiar with weapons, but only two, plus Laurent, had seen any combat. Another member of the group had gone south across the bridge to a family affair, and couldn’t come.

“This is my posse,” Laurent said. “They’re all deputized, they’ve all taken law enforcement courses, they’ve all qualified with handguns. We don’t want any shoot-outs, but I thought we could put them in the Gathering, in plainclothes, walking the place, looking for this Pilate guy. The main thing being . . . they don’t look like cops. You and I do.”

Lucas looked at the group and said, “Guys, I appreciate it, but are you sure you want to do this? Pilate is major trouble. He’s dangerous, almost certainly a psycho.”

Peters peered at Lucas through thick glasses and said, “We know we’re not exactly combat troops anymore, but that’s the point, isn’t it? If somebody has to go after Pilate mano a mano, that would be you or Rome. We’re sort of . . . pointer dogs.”

Laurent said, “One of the perennial problems with the Gathering is the trash that gets thrown around. We thought we could put one of the guys in there with paper pickup sticks, you know, those things with nails on the end, and some bags. A garbageman. Nobody’ll look at him twice. You and I, they’ll make us as cops, if they see us . . . but they won’t make these guys. The park is close enough to town that we’ll have cell service, so we can stay in touch.”

“Let’s talk about it,” Lucas said.

•   •   •

THEY DID THAT, and Lucas felt himself nodding. They were serious guys: smart and reasonably tough. They agreed that they wouldn’t initiate any action, even if they saw Pilate. They would carry guns: they all had concealed carry permits and Laurent had set up a combat shooting course at a local landfill.

“When we get tired of punching paper, we go after the rats,” Sellers said. “Rats are hard to hit with a pistol, but we do it.”

“Sometimes, anyway,” Frisell amended.

“We don’t want anybody shooting anybody, if we can avoid it,” Lucas said. “What we want is to spot these guys and drop a net on them.”

“We all agree on that,” Laurent said. “But we’ve got to work with what we’ve got and this is what we’ve got. My regular deputies—two of them, anyway—will be on duty at the park just as a regular thing. They’ll know what’s going on, so we’ll have four full-time cops, including you and me, right there. The posse will purely be for recon and backup.”

Lucas said, “Well . . . let’s get another beer.”

•   •   •

WHEN LUCAS LEFT, he felt that they had a plan: his biggest worry was that one of the part-timers would get hurt if there was a confrontation. They weren’t worried, though, and Laurent was confident that they could handle it. They agreed to rendezvous at Laurent’s house at nine o’clock the next morning, for a last talk, and then go on out to the park.

Back at the motel, Lucas got on the phone and talked to Letty and then to Weather, who said that Letty was doing all right, but getting cranky about it. “I don’t think she’s sat in one place longer than an hour in her whole life—those cracked ribs are getting her down. It’s gonna be a few more days before even the ibuprofen helps.”

“Every once in a while, without being a jerk about it, remind her of what can happen if you rush in on something without thinking. If she’d handled this better, she wouldn’t have gotten hurt, and the entire Pilate crew might be in jail. Instead of getting in Pilate’s face, she might have gone around their camp and written down all the numbers of the car tags—”

“Lucas, that would be mean.”

“And the experience, and the results, and the after-action analysis might just save her life sometime. Our little sweetie thinks she might want to become a cop, or an intelligence agent, or something. Something exciting. The thing is, if you really want to do something exciting, then you gotta be conservative about it. Be cautious-crazy. It’ll keep you alive. Any asshole can get an exciting job that kills him.”

“I’ll think about that. You might be right. I mean, if she doesn’t go to medical school . . .”

“And as far as medical school is concerned, you’ve got a couple of other kids to work with,” Lucas said. “Letty’s a lost cause. Unless there’s a job like Navy SEAL doctor.”

Silence, for a few moments, listening to Weather breathe, then she said, “Okay.”

•   •   •

DEL CALLED AN HOUR LATER, as Lucas was watching a West Coast baseball game. “I’m standing in Cory’s bedroom,” he said, his voice pitched low. “We got Cory, his wife, and his son, who’s legally an adult, though he’s telling us he never looked in the garage. The safe was in the garage and it’s seriously screwed up—I don’t know if anybody’ll ever be able to open it. Cory learned how to use a cutting torch by watching videos on YouTube. He managed to weld it into a blob.”

“That’s not our problem. Our problem was finding the safe. Hoist it up on a truck and get it downtown.”

“They’re doing that right now,” Del said. “I’m hiding in the bedroom so the TV cameras don’t see me.”

“TV?”

“I told you. Jon’s okay, but his idea of a raid is ten people with M16s and camo and helmets and three TV trucks. We could’ve gotten the same results by knocking on the door.”

“Well, the important thing is the safe.”

“What have I been telling you, Lucas? The important thing isn’t the safe,” Del said. “Who really gives a fuck about the safe? Nobody gives a fuck about anything but the entertainment media, of which we are now a branch.”

“Del . . .”

“Wake up and smell the coffee, dipshit. You should have been here. You should be out there talking to the talking heads,” Del said. “Instead, you’re up in the UP with your dick in your hand.”

“Good night, Del . . .”